Jason Niedle went to Mount Kilimanjaro in search of adventure.
He found a rainbow of experience ranging from inspiration to
exhaustion.

Hiking through the African rain forest to approach the sides of
the dormant Tanzanian volcano was "really beautiful,"
recalls the 31-year-old Anaheim, California, entrepreneur. That
changed after they began the high-altitude part of the ascent to
the 19,340-foot peak. "It was a brutal grind," says
Niedle, co-owner of 15-person Printmedia, a printing company. "I'd
take a step and breathe and take the next step and breathe. After a
couple of hours of that, I was ready to give up."

Niedle is far from the first entrepreneur to take on risk-taking
activities away from work. British superentrepreneur Richard
Branson first gained fame when a 1985 attempt to cross the Atlantic
by boat resulted in shipwreck and near-disaster. He's since
gone on to hot-air ballooning and other risky stunts.

Less famous entrepreneurs also enjoy a taste of danger. Mike
Belitz, owner of two audio-related businesses in El Segundo,
California, climbed Kilimanjaro along with Niedle and also likes to
hang-glide, skydive and fly stunt planes.

Belitz, 34, feels there's a close connection between
entrepreneurship and risky hobbies. "Entrepreneurs are
typically risk-takers," he says. "I think we like to see
if we can overcome challenges." Now that Belitz's two
companies, Sonic Sales Inc. and eBlitz Audio Labs, have grown
enough to employ 12, he looks to sports for his risk. "It
keeps me interested," he says. "If all I did was show up
at the office, I would die a pretty quick death."

Frank McKinney, a Boynton Beach, Florida, home-builder and
occasional motorcycle racer, agrees that the thrill of risking his
life on wheels is related to his business activities. "I get
the same rush in what I do-building large houses on speculation
without a buyer," says McKinney, 39, who employs six at
Frank
McKinney & Co. and is also the author of Make It
Big! (Wiley). The book reveals his philosophies about success,
one of which is to engage in risky activities to "exercise the
risk threshold like a muscle." McKinney says, "Eventually
it will become stronger and able to withstand greater
pressure."

Not everybody buys the idea that risk produces beneficial
effects. Andrew Zacharakis, a professor of entrepreneurship at
Babson College,
says studies have shown managers and entrepreneurs have similar
tolerances for risk. He also warns that lenders and investors may
be less likely to fund a venture when you engage in overly risky
extracurricular activities. "Investors like to see calculated
risks," he says. "That means minimizing all the risk you
can."

Carl Hiebert is also skeptical. In 1981, the Waterloo, Ontario,
motivational speaker was in a hang-gliding accident that left him a
paraplegic. A few years later, still in a wheelchair, Hiebert
piloted the first ultralight aircraft to fly across Canada.
Nowadays Hiebert makes a living talking to business audiences about
risk. But he doesn't wholeheartedly endorse it.

The risks he took, Hiebert says, were calculated ones, in which
he did everything possible to reduce the danger. "Risk-taking
to me should be an extremely prudent exercise," he says,
adding, "If the only way you can feel alive is to push
yourself close to death, then I think something's
wrong."

Compulsive risk-takers should ask themselves whether they're
engaging in daredevil activities instead of more important
emotional or spiritual risks, according to Hiebert.
"Sometimes," he says, "we get involved in physical
risk to avoid taking on the real risk."

For Niedle, Mount Kilimanjaro turned out to be a turning point
in more ways than one. Near the top, he was ready to give up, but
pushed himself on to complete the climb. And on the peak, he said,
he felt the lifting of the burden of a past business mistake that
had dogged him for years. He'd bought a business, he explains,
that turned out to be less than it was advertised and failed,
leaving him with a mountain of debt and lawsuits.

"I felt if I could get to the top of this mountain, I could
release the mental burdens and look beyond the mountain and get on
with my life," Niedle says. "And now I feel good. I feel
great. And this business is going well."